Call for Reform in Juvenile Adjudication

There are about 200,000 juveniles under the age of 18 that are currently in the adult justice system. This number is up over 200% from the average in the 1990's. Children as young as 14 and 15 are being put in adult penetentaries with adult criminal. What's shocking is that a report released by the Campaign for Youth Justice showed that the majority of teens in the adult system were convicted of non-violent offenses. So finally, many states are thinking about reforming their juvenille correctional system to ensure that non-violent juvenille offenders are not treated the same and placed with adult men and women.

In most cases, I cannot even blame the Judges for sending the children to adult penitentiaries. Many states have laws passed that mandates when certain offenses are committed or when a teenager is a certain age, that they must be tried as an adult. Connecticut is a perfect example. Children, 15 and older are tried as adults in all cases with no exception. How this law passed is beyond me, but I can guarantee that the overwhelming majority of 15 year olds who had to go into the adult system, came out a more hardened criminal then they ever would have in the juvenille system. A young 15 year old who has only committed small petty theft, or any other related non-violent offense will go into the system a boy, but come out a knowledgeable and more than likely, career criminal.

These types of laws reflects the government's disconcern with actually rehabilitating convicts that go into the system so that they may become more productive citizens upon release. As a result, reform tends to lean towards harsher punishment to deter crimes, instead of focusing on keeping the ones in jail from actually committing crime again. What this does is gives a false comfortability of crime rates decrease, but not because more people are necessarily being deterred from crimes, but because they are taking a large percentage of people off the streets in general. In order to deter crime and keep the rates down, sentencing gets longer, punishment for crimes become more stern so the criminals just end up staying in the system longer. The number of people encarcerated steadily continues rise to the point where a significant amount of the state population is encarcerated. This not only puts a pressure on the state systems economic expenses of housing, feeding, and guarding convicts, but also strains the general economy of the state by taking people out of the workforce, disallowing them to vote in the political system, and in so many words- ostricizing the people from participation in mainstream society. Assuming that every convict would otherwise be a productive members of society, that could be hundreds of thousands of people, primarily men, doing something more productive like; supporting a family, paying taxes, and maintaining a job. Without any type of rehabilitory measures, the cost of prison systems become more burdensome on the state budget and the whole economy suffers because young working age potential labor are taken out of society.

Don't get me wrong, I would agree that there are people under the age of 18 that should not only be tried as adults for their offenses, but should also be kept in prison for as long as possible, but that is only for the most eggregious crimes like murder and rape. 15, even 17 year old boys and girls that are being tried as adults for stealing someone's gym shoes is too much when they are being put in prison with 40 year old murderers. Those children may have committed crimes, but that does not mean that they do not deserve any rights. Juvenile violators rights should be protected just as much as any other individual, maybe even more because their rights are at a much greater risk to begin with. Adult prisons place young teenagers at risk for psychological, physical, and emotional abuse that can disallow them to ever be of use to our society, guaranteeing they will be psychologically damaged for life. But it doesn't end there, because disturbed teenagers eventually become disturbed adults who have kids, and more often then not, the cycle of violence, crime, and abuse is continued and perpetuated. Reform will not only help those kids that are going to jail for petty crimes, but will actually benefit the moral fabric of our society as a whole. This also means that if we ignore reform it can have the adverse effect, which bodes ill for a society who's moral fabric is on the brink of unravelling already.